I made a list of names... all the people that I had worked with who were dead now. I had 54 names on the list and just looking at it today, I could add five more. I remember making that list, but I'm not certain why I did it. I believe that I was sitting at my desk one day, mired in some miserable paperwork, and I just needed to let my mind go elsewhere for a break.

So, I started thinking about dead people. (go figure) And I made a list.

These weren't just names on a piece of paper. They were people I KNEW. People I worked with, ate with, laughed with and played golf with. All dead now.

I don't believe that anyone becomes conscious of his own mortality until he's outlived a lot of people. That's one of the reasons that kids are fearless. They aren't familiar with death. They believe that they will live forever.

A few minutes later, I heard his plaintive moan, "Rob! Look in my backpack. Get my Swiss Army kinfe. It's in the top left pocket."

I found the knife and asked, "Do you want me to bring it to you?"

"Not yet," he replied. "Open it up until you find the thing that looks like needle-nosed pliers." I did, and I found it.

"Got it, Steve," I said.

"Good. Now come over here and pull this turd outta my ass. I think it's stuck!"

I would have sacrificed my life for Steve. I would have done almost ANYTHING he asked me to do. But this was one time he was on his fucking own. I was NOT going to use a Swiss Army knife to pull a turd out of his hairy ass. Friendship goes only so far.

"Pinch it off or live with it, ya prick!" I yelled into the woods.

I was greeted with silence.

Steve eventually emerged from the bushes with toilet paper in hand about 15 minutes later. "Did it all come out all right?" I asked.

"Yeah. Once I blew that first plug out of my ass, everything was fine. YOU were no fucking help. And all along I thought you were my friend."

We laughed about that incident right up until the day he died. I think about it and laugh today.

I learned something interesting in Costa Rica when I was taking Spanish lessons from the bartender in the hotel. She had a book filled with American idioms that she couldn't understand. I can remember a few: "Go fly a kite." "That's a rough row to hoe." "Shoot the moon." "Go jump in the lake."

There were plenty of others and I tried to explain them to her, but eyes started glazing after a while. "It doesn't make SENSE!" she protested. I suppose not. I learned that Spanish has its own idioms that don't translate well.

I also told the bartender that she was talking to an American from the deep South and if she went to New York City (where every Costa Rican I talked to seems to be dying to visit) she would hear a totally different language. She gave me a pen and a bar napkin and I drew a rough map of the USA. I divided it into four distinct regions.

#1) The deep South. People there talk the way I do and they tend to have an accent that nobody studying English as a second language will understand.

#2) The midwest. That's where Standard American English comes from. Just look at how many newscasters and radio personalities come from the midwest.

#3) The northeast. Sweet Bejus!!! Pawk the Caw in the Gawage. Cuber (not "Cuba"). I don't consider New York City to be part of the northeast, because a totally different language is spoken there, but I didn't want to make my bartender any more confused than she already was.

#4) Pure yankee. Those are people from Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois and all parts around there. You want to tell the difference between a Southerner and a yankee? Just ask them to say, "nice, white rice." You can tell right away where THAT person came from.

I left the far west out of my sermon because I hadn't been there yet. I DID tell the bartender that people from California are easy to spot because they use "you know" and "it was like" all the time because they are inarticulate nut-heads.

Then she told me that Costa Rica has four different accents depending on what part of THAT country you happen to be in. Hell--- Costa Rica is about the size of Georgia--- how can THEY have four distinct accents? It was all Spanish to me.

But then I thought... I know the difference in my home state between the people who live below the fall line and those who live above it. WE DO NOT TALK THE SAME WAY.

If you have an ear for accents, the USA is an incredible place to be. If you like diversity in speech, we've got it. It's like music to me sometimes.

But we Southerners are gonna teach those yankees to talk right someday. The blogfest might be a start.

My grandmother just turned 93 years old. She's tiny and frail now, but she was a pisscutter in her younger days. Virgil told about how, when my grandfather administered haircuts to him and his two brothers, Mommie (that's my grandmother) always made sure that all three had enough hair left on their heads so that she could grab a handful and snatch them around when they fucked up. She would check the length of the cut, nod approvingly and say, "That's a good haircut. I can grab that."

Mommie was fixing supper one afternoon and wanted to make some cornbread, but she was out of buttermilk. She gave my Uncle George some money and told him to go to the store and buy a quart. George became distracted by some game he was playing and didn't scoot off quickly enough to suit Mommie. "I thought I told you to go to the store and buy a quart of buttermilk," she said to George, who was still playing in the yard and oblivious to his responsibility.

"I'm going in just a minute," he replied, which was the wrong thing to say to Mommie. She grabbed a switch and laid a nice lick on one of his bare shoulders. "You'll go RIGHT NOW!" she said, drawing back for another swipe. George went, kicking up a cloud of Kentucky dust behind him.

When George came home with the buttermilk, he had a nice, red welt on his arm from the switch-mark. "Look, Mommie," he said, pointing to the V-shaped stripe on his arm. "You made me a private."

"Yes, I did," Mommie replied. "And if you ever ignore me like that again, I'll promote you to sergeant."

She meant it, too.

I have hundreds of such stories to tell. I've heard a lot of them more than once, but I never get tired of hearing them again. I come from a long line of good storytellers. A meeting of my relatives is a lot like a blog-meet. If you want to get a word in edgewise, you'd better talk first and talk loud.

My family is quiet and shy, just like me.

~Acidman

At least I put last night to good use. I watched my beloved Georgia Bulldogs receive a disgusting ass-whipping from Boston College in the Music City Bowl, did my laundry, opened this blog site, stayed up late drinking wine and slept on the sofa. I woke up looking and feeling like Fido's ass. Now I don't know whether to make a pot of coffee and a lumberjack breakfast or just fix a very large Bloody Mary and waste this entire day.

Maybe I'll do both and finish cleaning my brand-new crackerbox house, except for my son's room, where it appears a daisycutter bomb went off, scattering GI Joes, plastic army men, assorted military equipment and one dirty sock all over the place. No, I'll just keep the door closed to that room and save the mess for the next time he visits so he can clean it up.

Maybe I'll break out my new collection of hypodermic needles and the magic elixer and give myself a crank injection. No, not the drug "crank," but an injection IN my crank. It's a long story, partially told below.

Before my bloodless cunt of an ex-wife started screwing her unemployed, dope-smoking lover and divorced me, I had a 3,200 square foot home on five acres of land, with four goats, 28 chickens, 3 dogs, 2 cats, and a half-acre garden. It was a genuine country estate, located more than a mile down a dirt road off Highway 30. I loved it there, not only because I could tend my animals, collect fresh eggs every day and pretend to be a farmer, but also because I could piss off my back porch any time I wanted to without worrying about being seen. Of course, I sometimes do that now, and even though I don't WORRY about being seen, I probably am.

I really liked my goats. I started out with two, Billy and Opie. I kept them in my fenced, two-acre North Forty out back, where they made great lawn mowers, keeping the prolific bermuda grass in the pasture neatly trimmed and providing entertainment in the evening when they would butt heads and attempt to hump each other in spite of the fact that they were both males.

The people who owned the house before me had kept horses back there and they (the horses) had torn a lot of holes in the fence. In the first spring I lived there, this presented a problem when a female goat down the street went into heat and I discovered that Opie should have been named "Houdini" for his ability to find escape routes in his quest to run down the street and service the available and willing "Elvira," a complete slut of a goat that now reminds me of my ex-wife. Every time I discovered him missing, I would drive my truck down to Bob and Sue's, find Opie in their goat pen, catch the horny bastard and have Sue drive me back home while I pinned Opie down in the bed of my truck until I could put him back in the pasture. I kept patching the fence and Opie kept escaping.

Finally, when Sue called one more day to announce, "He's Baaaaaak!" I had had enough. I went to Choo Choo's building supply store and bought enough fence to redo the entire area that the horses had damaged. When I started hanging the new fence, Billy stood by watching, munching bermuda grass and seeming only vaguely interested in what I was doing. I was mumbling to myself about how this would fix that rotten Cool Hand Luke once and for all and I would never have to go rope and wrestle his smelly ass back home again. When my big dog, Bud, walked up beside me, I didn't think twice about it. In fact, I believe I started telling him about how I was going to make it impossible for Opie to break out, run down the street and get laid again.

Then I heard "baaaaa." I looked over the new fence I was hanging and saw Billy on the other side, giving me the closest thing to a goat-grin I had ever seen. I dropped my hammer and said, "Whoa. You stay right there. I've got something nice for you." I ran to the barn, poured some goat feed into a bucket and ran back, hoping to lure the wandering goat back home. By then, however, he was nowhere to be seen. That's when I realized that Bud, being smart and powerful enough to unlatch the gate with his nose, had done exactly that when he came to see what I was doing. He also left the gate wide open behind him. Although Billy never crawled through holes in the fence that were barely larger than his head the way Opie did, he couldn't resist the sight of the open gate, where he could stroll to freedom with no effort whatsoever. Now I had two escapees to capture.

I finished hanging the fence before I went goat hunting. Opie, of course, was looking spent and satisfied, smoking a cigarette, barely able to keep his eyes open in Sue's goat pen. The slut-goat Elvira was asleep in the hay. But Billy was nowhere to be found. I captured Opie and took him home, which didn't take long because I was having so much practice at it. Then I drove around on a Billy-hunt and couldn't find him anywhere. I finally gave up.

About an hour later, I heard a knock on the front door and answered it to discover a teenaged boy that I didn't recognize. "Mister, are you missing a big, white goat?" he asked.

"Umm... that depends," I answered. "What did he do?"

"He's down at my house eating grass with our horses. Miss Sue said she thinks he belongs to you."

I confessed that the big, white goat was probably my missing Billy and that I would go retrieve him directly. I saw my neighbor, Cathy, an experienced goat-roper herself out in her yard, so I stopped and persuaded her to drive my truck back home after I captured the wandering Billy. We went together on the goat-quest.

Sure, enough, Billy was munching grass with the horses at the teenager's house. I still had my bucket of goat feed, so I first attempted to lure the hammer-headed creature to the truck by waving food under his nose. He preferred to eat grass with the horses. Then I decided to get physical. I would simply catch him unaware, snatch all four legs off the ground and carry him, bleating and grunting, back to my truck. It always worked on Opie, so I knew I could do it.

One factor I left out of my carefully calculated equation was the fact that Billy was at least half-again larger, heavier and meaner than Opie. When I attempted to wrap one arm around his neck and the other arm around his smelly ass and lift him off the ground, he didn't lift. He took off running. I found myself hanging on to a running goat by one arm around his neck while I was being dragged like a ragdoll along the ground, through a muddy ditch, and back onto some grass. I thunk a brilliant thought then: I'll grab one of his back legs and trip him up! So, I did, which threw him down on his side with all four cloven-hooved legs pointed right at me as I lay beside him. He proceeded to kick me with an action much like the bobbin on a sewing machine. As I am getting the upper hand by crawling on top of him to stop those painful leg-kicks, he commences to piss like a racehorse all over us both. Then he jerks his head up suddenly and gives me a head-butt right between the eyes with that Klingon forehead of his.

I am seeing stars, I believe I have some broken ribs and I know I have goat-piss soaking my clothes. But by then, I have an audience of about a dozen people, including several children who know me and who shout "Get him, Mr. Rob! Get him!" while the adults piss all over themselves laughing at me. I finally get a rope around his neck and wear him out just before I expire from exhaustion, pain, shame and humiliation. I wrestle the nasty bastard into the bed of my truck with the help (better late than never) of the teenaged boy who alerted me of my goat's location. I return Billy to the fenced North Forty, where he resumes his duty of eating grass as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred that day.

I went to the kitchen table and fixed myself a strong drink. Cathy had one, too, laughing and pinching her nose shut while she described the manly scent, at least for a goat, that surrounded me like a cloud. I had mud and goat-piss all over me and my left eye was swelling closed and turning black from the vicious head-butt I had received from that Klingon skull. When my slut of an ex-wife came home (of course, that was before the adultery, the unemployed dope-smoker lover and the divorce, so she was still my darling then) she took one look at me and said, "My God! What happened to you?"

"You oughta see the other guy," I replied

~Acidman Mars